Guild Wars 2

It’s hilarious people are upset with being paired with other languages. The problem of toxic map chats isn’t with the megaserver. It’s with your community. You ever play FFXI or FFXIV? Japanese, English, French, and German players sharing servers and map chats, and what do you know? No one cares about seeing a line in another language.

Report the people flaming others in map chat. Tell them to shut up. Nothing is wrong with being exposed to other languages.

French servers should be grouped together. German servers should be grouped together. It’s a huge mess at the moment.

They are. They just happen to be grouped in the same map. It’s fairly simple to understand.

Basically, this is the only buff to eles:

Burning Speed: This skill now evades attacks.
Frozen Burst: This skill is now a blast finisher.
Water Trident: Added 3 seconds of regeneration to up to 5 allies in the radius.
Armor of Earth: Reduced the recharge from 90 seconds to 75 seconds.

Burning Speed and Frozen Burst are cool. Water Trident is alright? Armor of Earth is pretty pathetic.

This doesn’t adequately address the survivability, cooldown, and complexity problems that elementalists have. Our skills have higher cooldowns and do less, meaning we have to chain them together just to get the same result as a warrior or mesmer rolling their face over their keyboard — not even better, just the same. It also appears that someone in the distant past thought elementalist’s idea of surviving was to have low HP but a good amount of active healing and defense, except they implemented the first part and forgot (or nerfed) the second.

Somewhat unrelated, but one trait change I had in mind was making Elemental Attunement an inherent part of the class, but weaken it a little and have the trait make it AoE. That way, Arcana wouldn’t be a mandatory trait line, and folks could experiment with other traits should they want to spec into it anyway.

Too be fair, ConorT, this is (was) kind of a huge deal. Not being able to speak is crippling in an MMO.

But it looks like the new build that was just released fixed everything. Thanks, team.

I don’t agree with the single point traits. There was no reason to have a trait line be anything other than a multiple of five, and you were severely limiting yourself if you did that. I also see where ArenaNet is coming from wrt starting at 30. By then, you should be familiar and comfortable with skill points, your class, and combat in general. That’s the foundation to using traits effectively. If you don’t understand those things, you end up making poor trait decisions. Starting at 30 gives people some time to get used to everything.

That would make sense for me, Chad, because I entered the Grove with one of my characters in order to sell a few things, and then I tried to talk soon after.

Same. Pretty terrible bug, here.

I saw ArenaNet’s GDC presentation a while ago, and one of the key things they mentioned was that since they are B2P, income isn’t guaranteed like with subscriptions, so they need to be as efficient as possible. Marketing is hit or miss, so it’s understandable they wouldn’t be pushing all the time. The ArenaNet presenter said that NCSoft is very hands-off with them, so it wouldn’t be crazy for them to be in charge of their own advertisement.

But you know what isn’t efficient? Removing content your developers and designers and QAs spent thousands of hours making because you’ve randomly decided it’s temporary. You know what isn’t efficient? Bundling minor class balances with major overhauls, making the effects of the balances indistinguishable from the rest of the update. You know what isn’t efficient? Ignoring quality of life and other simple changes for God-knows-what reason as your users become bitter and annoyed, and lurkers who pass through see the resentment on the forums and wonder if they want to invest in a game that seems like it doesn’t know what it wants to do or how long it wants to take doing it.

I don’t mean to say the forums or the community is the end-all, be-all of what should happen. Most of what goes on is just venting or nonsense. But if your community is pushing for something, give your answer to them straight. Don’t tease them along for a year (check out the necro’d WvW forum posts to see how long ago ArenaNet was promising extremely simple quality of life changes.) Don’t ignore them. Put that junk in a sticky at the top of the page so your users can point other users to where their question has been answered before. There’s no reason to be secretive or wishy-washy. I get that development is tough and you can never know when something will be done. But end users don’t care. Every day that passes without someone giving them an update, every month or year that passes with hundreds of bug reports sitting unanswered breeds toxicity.

Still bugged in Sanctum of Rall… what’s going on with this?

That sounds an awful lot better than servers doing less than ethical things in order to win, or people getting upset because things outside their control (server population, morale) are causing them to lose.

I’d say removing the server-wide rewards from WvW might be a good thing. It would mean the rewards for participating at that moment would be the reason to play, not any overarching reward or title or bragging right.

So the issue with WvW players not buying gems is that it gives them a reason to stop supporting WvW in favor of PvE content. (Doubtful they’d do that, as they know as well as anyone it would literally kill the game. WvW is huge, given how much of the discussion on fan sites revolves around it and how many people consider it to be the end game.)

Why not then get the support of the PvE community? If they stop buying gems or voice their concerns as loud as the WvW community, wouldn’t that force ArenaNet to involve themselves more?

I think the problem is that — despite the community’s opinion — ArenaNet thinks WvW is fine how it is. They don’t involve themselves in the community because they view it as futile, since nothing you could say would change their mind that WvW is perfectly fine. Matches? Working perfectly. Siege? Fine how it is. Server balance? Horribly unbalanced fights are the intention! It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.™

So really, I just see two choices: Get the support of the entire GW2 community (not just the WvW crowd), or completely detach yourself from caring about the game because anything short of a kitten riot isn’t going to light a fire under ArenaNet’s kitten.

(It’s also possible they don’t want to touch WvW because they don’t want to “break” it and kitten off the large number of players who have a diverse set of reasons for participating in WvW. However, judging by how often they change up everything else on a whim, it’s 99% likely they just don’t feel like their resources should go towards it at this time.)

Report the harassers.

magic fly.2041:

I never said that thieves were a-ok. Just that a fight that a person can run away from, heal up, and come back without any way to stop them is not fun at all. This means that I think thieves are not ok as they fall into that category, but this is a thread about elementalists.

Sorry if that seemed directed at you. It was directed at the folks who decided that elementalist was overpowered for that reason but thief is just dandy.

magic fly.2041:

then zip away with RTL until cooldowns are back, then jump back into battle, and so on. It was impossible to kill.

So, thief? Why was that over the line but thieves doing the exact same thing (attack attack attack, stealth away when you get in trouble, come back to wear them down) is a-okay?

Reddit is hit or miss due to the voting. It has a huge problem with bandwagon opinions, but that’s sort of offset by most people being alright. Kind of sad it’s considered the “best” though.

That’s a real shame. Being able to switch traits on the fly now is the perfect opportunity to release a build manager. They could even sell build slot unlocks…

Deli.1302:

Anything that discourages people from playing together will never ever make it into the game.

cough event scaling cough

OP: I think that’s an interesting idea. However, instead of a negative effect, what if everyone starts with a positive effect and it’s taken away with the more people in your area? So you start with a stack of 25 <status> that boosts some stats a respectable amount. Then, with each person of your alliance in your immediate area (basically within a radius of 1200) the buff gets -1 stack until it’s all gone.

elprimo.4398:

I think our damage does compensate for our lack of survivality. The problems is the cd. Landing a full burst combo can be devastating. I have one shot players without stun breakers.

But then you realize people with half brain cell knows that after the updraft comes the pain. And since is on a 40cd(32 traited). I can’t survive that long. I would be happy if they make earthquake a 3-4sec knockdown. Or a launch just like updraft.

I think that’s the biggest issue. Elementalist requires these long combos and perfect rotations just to do the same amount of damage as a burst thief or mesmer, and we have worse survivability. Essentially, we require far more skill in order to play at the same level as other classes that require a minimal amount of skill. That would be fine if we got something out of it, like our potential damage was higher but it took more skill, but to invest all that practice and work just to be as good as every other class… It’s stupid.

I leveled warrior because it was nice to push out the same amount of damage without having to create three combo fields and switch attunements ten times. I’m leveling thief now so I can roam in WvW, and it has a very elementalist feel to it except it’s a lot easier.

I’d recommend either.

I used staff when leveling because the extra range on all the skills, plus the support and CC, was a huge help. Especially at low levels when we don’t have any of the traits to help us, going dagger/dagger was a nightmare.

I got hyped about elementalist when I first started playing because I loved the idea of being able to tank, heal, and dps depending on attunement and traits. But then I started playing, and it became obvious they need to jump through so many hoops to do any of them. I mean, I got an elementalist to 80 and then made a thief so I could at least try roaming in WvW, and I was just shocked at the versatility of their skills. Everything gives them stealth, they have tons of conditions and evades… and all of them on such a short cooldown! What the heck!? Take Shadowstep for example: 1,200 range, breaks stun, and warps you back to the original position while curing three conditions. And all of this on a 50 second cooldown (which starts when Shadowstep is used and turns into Shadow Return, not when Shadow Return is used.) Then take elementalist’s Lightning Flash: 900 range, doesn’t break stun, doesn’t cure conditions, and does 365 damage. Oh, and it’s on a 40 second cooldown.

I’d love to know who on the dev team hates elementalists.

Yes, elementalist is terribly balanced right now due to damage not compensating for the crap survivability we get. Unlikely ArenaNet will do anything, though. If there actually is a balance team, it’s pretty obvious they don’t care about eles.

Are you running WvW? Most of the time, if your zerg heads to that map, they will take objectives that people need for map completion.

The loot is alright, and the world events are good in that there are a good bit that do have repercussions. I agree with build diversity and dungeons, though. Those are the two things I think they should really work on — especially dungeons. Mobs have so much HP and can kill you very easily. It’s not a test in skill. It’s a test in patience, and it’s completely different than the rest of the game, which has you fighting short but relatively fun battles.

Really great post.

After watching the GDC presentation, I kind of understand where some of the problem comes from, especially wrt management. Being a “programmer’s company” is as much a detriment as it is a boon, because — for the most part-- programmers are terrible managers.

Programmers don’t want to work on boring things. They want to squeeze that 0.01% optimization out. They want to push new features and fix awesome, noticeable bugs. They get sidetracked spending 99% of their time on something only 1% of people will care about. “Ugh, I have to go back into that part of the engine for this bug? I haven’t touched that in ages! I’d have to familiarize myself with it all over again… I want to work on this other thing!” They lack the overall perspective of the project that a proper manager has, and that causes a lot of the things outlined in this thread.

I mean, as soon as he said that they build all their tools themselves internally, I knew exactly what he meant. Programmers want to program! They want to spend two months building a tool instead of a week incorporating a third party one into their existing workflow. And if there’s a bug or they get stuck? Better rewrite the whole thing!

And all that adds up to an extremely glacial development process that turns your customers bitter. So when someone touts their company as a “company made of programmers,” it’s pretty much saying, “a company with managerial problems.” That sounds worse than I mean it to, but it’s something that’s painfully obvious. There’s a very real lack of focus with the updates being pushed out, and that isn’t the fault of the developers or QA or the design team. It’s a management problem.

I say this as someone who genuinely enjoys this game and is also a programmer. It’s incredibly fun, and I appreciate all the work put into it and all the changes it’s brought to the genre. I just want to vent about some of the frustrating things I’ve noticed and where I believe they stem from.

This is totally just like real war, what with the magic spells, the ability to move massive amounts of numbers by teleportation, the immortality, the unlimited resources, and the way god-like figures swoop in every four months to make changes to certain strategies.

Just like real war!

My favorite part of fighting YB was when you all would crumble or run as soon as your numbers were matched.

Awesome video, commenting here so I can find it again! Makes me feel better about investing so much time in celestial gear.

Yes they will, Blood Red Arachnid.

I think you have a point about focus, but I feel like this is biting off more than you can chew. It’s just way too much of an overhaul. Good ideas, though.

Personally, I think they should axe 6 traits per line and make the remaining 6 give more of a buff but have an obvious “package” sort of deal. Instead of having one trait that (for example) reduces <skill> cooldown and another that gives <skill> some sort of buff, you’d consolidate those two into a single trait. This would have the absolutely huge benefit of making it obvious which traits work well together as defined by the dev team as well as making the small number of traits easily balanced.

As it stands, giving players so much choice has two problems:

1. It enables them to shoot themselves in the foot by picking traits and skills that have no benefit with each other. This might not be a problem with “easy-mode” classes like warrior, but for elementalist (who’s been getting the short end of the stick in terms of class balance), it’s killer.

2. It causes the devs to be in a constant nerf-buff-nerf-buff cycle. When the playerbase, due to the staggering number of trait/skill/gear combinations, discovers the tactic of the month, it gets nerfed, which buffs another class into the spotlight. Having fewer combinations means the nerf-buff rollercoaster is more like nerf-buff speed bump.

Consolidating traits and skills isn’t a huge thing, either. It doesn’t require a gigantic overhaul of the class system.

Definitely post this in the bug report forums. It’s one of the many tooltip bugs they need to fix.

Sad Tas.2509:

lmao

FA will win silver based on stomps alone, I’m getting so many bags from your awful server WvW is actually profitable for once.

Dont act like your server is any good because you got a kittenload of free transfers

enjoy your bandwagon while it lasts, because history shows it wont

I’m not even on HoD. Defensive, much? I think you can talk to a therapist about that crippling insecurity.

Banzie.5248:

No, 12:30 PM is EU prime time, NA doesn’t start til later, even if its the weekend. Hence I said a lot of people are on from NA since is the weekend. Through the week, where matches are decided, this is EU prime 5 days>2 days

12:30pm server during weekdays is EU prime time going into NA prime time (when kids get out of school on the east coast.) 12:30pm server on the weekend is a mixture, most definitely not just EU prime time, and most definitely not a reason to ignore how fast HoD climbed up from third place.

Jado Cast.1805:

Ok, thank you. That’s not very clear in the description.

It’s… pretty clear. They say “all contestable waypoints.” As in, only the waypoints that can become contested. Just take a few seconds to read it.

Banzie.5248:

A:) The score is currently showing what happened over night, Ocx/SEA.
B:) This is EU Primetime currently, Sure its populated with NA as well over the weekends.
C:) NA Prime generally starts ~3-4PM Server time for the EST peeps.

The more you know!

It’s Saturday at 12:30pm server time. That’s a pretty heavy NA time, since it’s 3:30pm EDT and everyone is off of school and work. There are plenty of NA folks on right now.

Perhaps the prediction was just… wrong?

Reverence.6915:

Looks like HoD’s new NA crew can’t match the experience brought by YB and FA.

looks at current score

Uh, what?

Is this proof that most of the folks making WvW predictions pull them straight out of their kitten

Realist.5812:

1) Now when you throw out a recruitment message, you’ll be talking to a map with 90% of people not on your server

Wrong. They said the exact opposite: That you’ll be placed with folks from your server or guild first and foremost.

2) When you try organise a pug raid, example, “We’re flipping [insert server]’s borderland, come join!” you’ll instead be talking to people not on your server, whilst also letting the server you’re attacking know that your about to storm them.

It’s extremely unlikely you’ll be put with the exact server you’re planning to rush, and that the server will have someone who a) knows what your map message means, and b) can let the folks in their WvW know.

Please don’t make assertions unless you’re actually familiar with what the devs have said. It’s tiring to read the same misinformation and ignorance.

I had the same thought as you. I actually bought all the exotic recipes, then realized the time investment would be better spent going towards the ascended versions. I feel like I wasted 100g.

I guess the devs hate celestial just as much as they hate the class that gets the best use out of it. :’(

Wow, what the heck is up with the vitriol in this thread? You all haven’t even tried it and you’re already announcing it will ruin the game, or that “Anet isn’t listening to the players!!!1” when maybe 0.1% of the people are on here complaining while the rest are looking forward to it silently. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean ArenaNet has to change what they’re doing. What a load of entitlement.

cassiekessie.9356:

Dreading this. Why Anet seem to believe that all of their client base seeks a zergfest is beyond me.

Maybe because they do? Even when the content obviously doesn’t call for zergs (see: scarlet’s generals), people will find a way to shoehorn them in. 99% of the player base actively seeks zerg content.

Ranger Hussy.9523:

my complaints about this mess are real simple, i will no longer be able to schedule activities my guild may want to do unless it falls into the times that anet feels we should do it, those boss unlocks are just the mega bosses, not the champs or even temples, they fail to remember that our real lives dictate most of ours playing times since we work/married/have kids etc.

That’s true right now, and it would be doubly true if they were to take your advice and “consolidate servers” and slash the available boss timers by 20%. If you want to fight bosses on your own time, join a guild that will schedule frequent pops. I have no idea what you’re talking about wrt champs, as they’re on a frequent spawn schedule as it is. Temples are actually more likely to be in progress/open since more people will be in the zone; you’ll no longer need to guest around looking for an open temple.

eleshazar.6902:

They have openly said there will be no more separate worlds in PvE/PvP anymore.

They literally said that your home world will still affect the people you’re placed with in the megaserver instance. This was one of the first things they stated about it. How did you get “There aren’t going to be any more home worlds!!!11” out of that?

zaced.7948:

i quite don’t like the loss of control of where i am playing. i don’t appreciate a machine choosing for me where i want to be.
i also fear that organizing larger events might become hell on earth with the megaserver system. why not make a list of opened overflow instances? what would be the problem to list all overflow instances and let the player choose on which he wants to play? would there be any downside to that? aside from resembling the guild wars district system…

It wouldn’t be intuitive at all. If you’re a new player, you have no idea what “overflow instances” and all that junk are. The majority of people heading into a map do not care which map instance they get put into.

You already don’t have control, because you can’t control if the map is filled and you get sent into an overflow. At least with this system, you’ll be put with folks on your own server.

eleshazar.6902:

Although I see this approach as not helping. I’m not worried as much about this system in low pop maps. I’m worried about it in high pop maps, like cities, or when a guild event happens. If my whole guild can’t get into a map and keeps getting split because you can’t shove out randoms… gg.

I’m not sure how so many people still think this will be a problem. They’ve addressed it multiple times.

In short, your guild (as well as people in your friend list and home server) will all be put in the same instance, and you can still “taxi” people into the instance you’re in.

Olvendred.3027:

huge amount of rudeness

Nothing you quoted has anything to do with what you replied with. Samuel wasn’t talking about removing home servers. The devs have stated multiple times that servers are not going away. And I wouldn’t go pointing to highschoolers for lessons on establishing communities.

party members, friends list, guild, language. That’s it.

They literally included your home server as part of that list. How could you miss that?

Lord Kuru.3685:

Actually, the reason people are so worried is that Anet has shown time and again that they don’t know what they’re doing.

I’d bet they didn’t consider at all the implications of no longer being able to ask for help in Lion’s Arch.

I dunno, honestly I think you all are spoiled. Try playing another MMO and getting the same level of quality out of it. This sort of update is a rare thing to happen. I play FFXIV and you would never see a release like this. They have major content patches, but it’s a vertical gear grind and they always mess something up with anything they implement. They actually just added something akin to GW2’s transmutation system… except instead of making it simple like ArenaNet is aiming to do, they made it so you need to get specific charges depending on the piece of equipment (roughly 4 or 5 different levels of charges spread out over 7 crafting professions for the various levels of armor) and there are a handful of restrictions that aren’t very clear.

Even considering the recent buggy living story updates (which frustrated me just as much as the next person), they still have a better track record than 99% of developers.

Even if they did implement server merging for WvW (ArenaNet said the implications of megaserver for WvW would be a “long term plan”, so I’m doubtful anything about WvW is in this feature patch) I really doubt they’d do it so poorly that it would kill off WvW guilds. I mean c’mon: They aren’t Square Enix. Even though ArenaNet may take a while, they know what they’re doing.

@Johje Holan: I think the thought here would be that red vs blue vs green would be servers grouping up based on population (whether that’s based on total or WvW is another thing.) So there wouldn’t be an issue with populations, because the populations would be evened out by the system.

For instance, say there are four servers: A high population (7,000), a medium population (5,000), another medium population (5,000), and a low population (3,000). You could group the high and low population servers together and the medium population servers together and have a very nice 10,000 vs 10,000. Obviously the numbers wouldn’t be that round, but it would be much better than right now where half the WvW matches are complete blowouts due to population and coverage.

I think it would be interesting for them to merge servers like that utilizing the megaserver technology. But yeah, they’d have to preserve individual server identity.

One way they could is do exactly what they’re doing for PvE content: Prioritize joining the instance that your server is currently on.

Lots of angry mesmers in this thread.

Honestly, take it slow. You are only going to be able to get one charged quartz crystal per day anyway, meaning it will take a minimum of 30 days to craft the full set. Just knock out whatever you can early ([lesser] vision crystals, the slot-specific materials) and then gradually acquire the rest.

I think that would be a little too complicated just for a scoring system. Scoring should be invisible to people; they should be naturally gaining points as they complete objectives that give their own rewards.

In my opinion, the current system of how points are obtained is good. The problem is scores aren’t weighted. Taking a keep for an hour at 6pm server gives just as many points as taking it at 9am server, when the force taking the keep would have been met with a substantially smaller resistance.

I think ArenaNet’s logic was “it’s just as likely each server will have coverage problems, essentially evening it out.” Except that’s not how it works. Off-hour players congregate to the same servers due to wanting to play with folks who also play in their same time zone. What we have now is a massive imbalance of coverage. It’s actually separate from population issues, too. You could theoretically have a server with a large population but terrible coverage if everyone only plays during NA prime time, and you could have a server with a small population but wreck everyone in PPT due to covering 3am to 2pm server as well as whatever they grab during prime time. So the solution doesn’t necessarily need to be tied to world population.

All timezones are not equal.

I don’t mean to say NA timezones are better than EU/SEA timezones. I mean to say that, if you play on a server for a specific region and are not from that region, your timezone/peak should not be given the same treatment as the “main” timezone. I wouldn’t join a EU server and expect everything to revolve around EST. It’s silly to act like UTC+12 is exactly equal to UTC-8 when the server and the majority of the community sits in UTC-8 or UTC-5. All that does is ignore the reality of a lack of adequate coverage for many servers. I mean, the thread title is proof enough. If we went by the logic of “every timezone is equal”, then there would be no “nightwatch”.

The fact of the matter is: Players tend to join servers that have people from their same region. A handful of servers control the majority of off-hour coverage, either naturally or through recruiting. These servers are the ones who consistently top the WvW fights due to taking advantage of the lack of players in off-hours as well as making the second and third place servers feel like upgrading their garrisons and keeps is pointless since they’ll be captured as soon as everyone goes to bed.

This is a real problem for WvW, and I feel like any adequate solution would have to touch on the disparity between off- and peak-hours. We can’t just ignore it, because we end up with convoluted solutions that barely touch on the main problem and introduce more.

A quick and dirty solution would be to halve the number of points you get during certain hours. Maybe make it impossible to cap keeps and/or garrisons during off-hours. That would mean you could cap supply camps, so the enemy team would wake up with no supply, but they wouldn’t wake up with their entire map taken from them. A more complex one would be to scale points based on the number of enemy players in WvW. You shouldn’t get the same amount of points when you walk into a keep at 6am that you get when you take it and hold it during a huge fight.

In fact, I would even go as far to say that the total number of points you’d get for holding enemy objectives during off-hours should be the same as the number of points you’d get for holding it for a single hour during prime time.

From my interactions with BP as a SoR player, it would have been awesome if we were matched up with them and another similar-sized group. They’re a great server to play against because their commanders know what they’re doing and we seem to have similar coverage (BP a little bit more.)

YB on the other hand only has coverage and numbers. Any time SoR or BP go up against them with a similar force, they crumble. I’m not sure about this “defensive strategy” mentioned earlier, because the only strategy I’ve seen has been “throw numbers, and if that doesn’t work, wait until 4am server.” We’ve taken garrisons and keeps from them multiple times when they’ve had the positional (and sometimes numerical, as in 2 to 1) advantage.

@gennyt BP has been fun to fight against. I haven’t heard anything negative about them, and I haven’t seen anyone from there be a jerk (killing in JP or taunting after a kill like a bunch of people from YB have done.)

Karizee.8076:

Not a peep out of Lord Vanquish.

https://twitter.com/Lord_Vanquish

I wasn’t around for the first SAB, but just seeing those videos, that looks incredibly fun. And I really want to farm some of those weapon skins…

I wish they’d bring it back.